Technology Development for Space Applications

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The bulk of the funding requested is to develop further the miniature seismometers that have been built for Exomars to make them suitable for use on penetrator missions. This involves electronic development to reduce power usage without compromising noise performance as well as ruggedisation to allow them to survive impact.The Silicon microstructures that are the core of the seismometers are built by Imperial college. The work packages detailed here cover the seismometer electronics, packaging and test. Oxford have, for a number of years, being developing miniature spectrometers intended for future flight missions. The optical design of these has been led by Francis Reininger, an ex Graduate student and now visiting fellow at Oxford. Francis produced the optical design for Cassini-VIMS and for the Rosetta-VIRTIS spectrometer. His latest interferometer design offers superior noise performance using commercially available detectors, very wide wavelength coverage and low cost optics manufacture. This instrument is currently being breadboarded in Oxford and is in the base-line payload for Marco Polo. It is also our strongest candidate for the infrared channels on the proposed ORTIS instrument for Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter. The instrument could in-pirinciple be ready for use on the Exomars 2016 orbiter if the scanning and control sub-systems are brought up to a high technical readiness level in the near future. The Oxford portion of the Exomars AEP meterological package is, with the exception of acoustic wind sensors, now very mature and no significant technology development is needed before proposing this for any new mission opportunities. We have, however, recently completed fabrication of a new batch of thermal wind sensors and a new design of acoustic sensor. The Engineering Science department's wind tunnel remains available to us for the rest of this year so we request a small amount of support to bring the testing of these sub-systems to a close.